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POOKIE: A TALELet's imagine spending a moment or two in the Middle Ages.What are the images that come to mind?Turreted castles, ladies in rose-coloured gowns and pointy hats, peasants gathering sheaves of wheat, monks in black cassocks.........and pigs!Flick through the pages of any Book of Hours or look at any medieval tapestry and there they are, wandering in alleyways or grubbing for acorns in oak-leafy woods, always in tilted profile, like the animals in bestiaries, and always with that mona lisa smile and those knowing human eyes.The jolly pig, rotund and self-satisfied.Now set those images of the Middle Ages aside, and take a stroll around your local urban neighbourhood.Any pigs about today?Can you hear the clippety clop of trotters in the shopping mall?Are there snouts in the gutters, muddy wallows where football boots have cut up the soil around the goal posts in the park?Hardly.If you are a city dweller, animals will have pretty much disappeared from your landscape, apart from the odd dogon-leash or cat-on-porch and a scattering of doughty little street birds.Pigs are still out there somewhere, of course, as witnessed by the ham and bacon in the nation's fridges.But they are out of sight, sequestered in prison-camps that are externally unidentifiable, no longer part of anybody's landscape, anybody's life.Why is this so?Why have pigs, and all the other animals who have figured so essentially in human history, dropped from view?Is this exclusion an integral aspect of modernity?What are the consequences of the rupture of these age-old relations between humanity and its nonhuman confreres?Could these relations be re-established?Could relations of commensality, for instance, replace those of farming or herding in a contemporary urban context?But what would that imply for our eating habits?Could we, with our current levels of reflexivity, continue to eat animals whose conspecifics were cherished by us as domestic companions?And if we found it intolerable to eat such animals, how would we deal with them when they escaped captivity and turned into feral invaders of our indigenous ecosystems?Is there indeed any place for wildlife, feral or indigenous, in the modern imagination?Is making such a place essential to the ecological revisioning of modernity?
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